Black Swallowtail Cats Going To School!

We had an exciting day to say the least on the Durham Butterfly Count. My party of three ladies and myself found well over 1000 butterflies and 45 species in all! We had a total of 396 Eastern Tiger Swallowtails, not a record for the count but likely as many as the other 4 parties found combined.  Also we had 53 Silvery Checkerspots and Will by himself found 50 as well blowing away the normal 12-15 found on the previous counts. Usually 1 Zebra Swallowtail is a lucky find on this count, we had 16 of them and Will had 4, so 20 in all!

The bad news is Meg and I both found maybe 500 seed ticks on our pants. I have never seen seed ticks in these kind of numbers around here. The places I have been where seed ticks are found someone usually brings tape to get them off our clothes. We dowsed them in bug spray to get rid of them and then took a very strong shower after the count.

OK now to the title posting about Black Swallowtails. Meg now teaches second grade and as many of you might know second grade usually teaches about life cycles. Tonight we gleaned around 20 of the 38 Black Swallowtail caterpillars in our garden to take to class tomorrow! Our Bronze Fennel finally brought in some Black Swallowtails, we only saw 2 today on the count.

These 4 Black Swallowtail caterpillars we all lined up on the fennel this evening, ready for school! We left these in the garden as they were eating a fennel in a place we don't want fennel. Fennel is very invasive be careful if you do plant it as it grows very well in the gravel driveway where it is hard to dig up. I usually toss out 2 out of 3 plants in the garden every spring.

male Black Swallowtail on verbena, from years past in our garden.

female Black Swallowtail on thistle.
Learn more about Black Swallowtails on my main web page at this link. Note when you get to the Black Swallowtail page you will find a second page link on the bottom left and links to similar swallowtails as well as all my pages do.

One other thing I wanted to mention about raising butterflies in the classroom. There are a lot of butterfly farms that sell kits of Painted Ladies and Monarchs from places far away for schools to raise. A lot of butterfly watchers do not approve of bringing in distant populations of butterflies and mixing them into local populations. At least we know these Black Swallowtails were of a local population and once mature releasing them back into the wild will not harm or alter the local population. Good thing Meg has me the butterfly guy as a partner isn't it?

Banner Swallowtail Year!

It was back in 2001 the last time we had a banner year with Eastern Tiger Swallowtails. The Durham Butterfly Count tallied 1800 Eastern Tiger Swallowtails in 2001, so years we are lucky to get 50. On Monday Meg and I counted 21 Eastern Tiger Swallowtails in our garden. I believe that is a new record here. The flowers they are using here in the garden are Butterfly Bush, Phlox, Joe-pye-weed and Miss Huff Lantana.

I have noticed two different blogs, well actually three blogs that recently got the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail mixed up with the Spicebush Swallowtail. You can check out the links I just posted in the last sentence or read on.

I'm giving you this from my shoulder, a photo I took on my birthday of a dark form female Eastern Tiger Swallowtail. Notice the tiger stripes on the forewings is an easy field mark. This dark tiger got stuck inside our screened porch and I caught it barehanded and took it outside to be released. It spent 10 minutes checking me out before it flew off.

Here is the dark form female tiger on my finger!
The photo below is where people get mixed up.

This is a male Spicebush Swallowtail.

Notice the large blue-green roundish spots near the marginal edges of the hindwings. It does look a good bit like the dark form female Eastern Tiger Swallowtail.

The normal female Eastern Tiger Swallowtail enjoying Joe-pye-weed.
Notice the blue in the hindwings, this is how you tell the females from the males

Here is a male Eastern Tiger Swallowtail on my phlox!
Note the absence of blue on the hindwings

This Monarch was on Joe-pye-weed at the butterfly garden in Little River park about two miles from here. Pretty happy with the evening nature light on these photos taken with my little G11 camera!

Above is a gourd blossom from our garden. Wish us luck the last time we tried to grow these we did not get any gourds.

Those of you that live nearby Durham might be interested in the Durham Butterfly Count it is being held on Sunday August 15th. I'll be leading a team of butterfliers and our garden will be part of the my route. Here is a message from Jeff Pippen about the count:
Butterfliers,

Pack your binoculars -- Sunday August 15th is the 2010 NABA Durham
Butterfly Count. We routinely see between 50-60 species, vying for the highest
species diversity of any count in the Carolinas.  The Durham count circle
harbors numerous excellent butterflying locations, so we can use all the eyes
we can get!  Beginners welcome (see below).

We will meet in the NC Museum of Life and Science parking lot on
Murray Ave in Durham at 8:45a.m., Sunday 15 August.  We'll divide into groups where
beginners will be teamed up with experienced leaders, who will already know
their coverage areas, and we will try to depart the parking lot by 9am.
Butterflying may involve slowly driving/walking down dirt roads, hiking powerlines,
searching fields, wetlands, etc.  Weather permitting, we'll survey
butterflies until late afternoon and then reconvene at 4:45pm at the Museum for a
compilation of sightings.

Fast food restaurants may or may not be available, depending on your
coverage area, so I encourage participants to pack their own snacks, a lunch,
and LOTS of beverages as it's usually pretty toasty outside this time of year.
And I always recommend hiking boots, long pants, a hat, sunscreen and
binoculars.
Note that there is a mandatory $3 per person fee to participate
(levied by and forwarded to NABA for printing/compiling costs).

If you need directions to the museum, check out their website at
http://www.ncmls.org/.  Click on "visit the museum" and scroll down to
the directions.  (Heck, the website is worth checking out anyway!)

Please contact Jeff if you plan to participate, so that I can coordinate
groups for the count.